Thelegal press reported some time ago that a conference of Zemstvo leaders from
various parts of Russia had been held in Moscow. Moskovskiye
Vedomosti[2]
even sought to give the alarm, shouting that the
government was allowing revolutionary assemblies to be held in Russia, and that
it was necessary to call a congress of the monarchist party, etc.; but no one
paid serious attention to these outcries, since the police these days have their
hands full with affairs of a much more disturbing nature. By all accounts,
however, the Zemstvo men kept within the bounds of their usual constitutional
aspirations. Still, their conference proceedings were of considerable interest,
inasmuch as they comprehended the agrarian question. We quote in full the
theses which, by the press reports, were adopted by a majority of the
conference:

“1)State interference in the economic life should be extended to agrarian
relations as well.
2) Proper agrarian legislation presumes a radical change
1??].
3) The impending agrarian reform should be framed on the following
principles:
I. Improvement of the economic conditions of the farming class by
the compulsory redemption of the necessary supplementary plots from private
holdings for the benefit of the land-poor of various categories [the elaboration
of this question has been entrusted to several persons].
II. Crown lands and
some of the royal demesnes to be declared state lands; these state lands to be
increased by the purchase and redemption of privately owned land and to be
utilised for the benefit of the labouring population.
III. The conditions of
lease to be regulated through governmental intervention in the relations between
owners and tenants.
IV. The establishment of public and state mediation
commissions to enforce agrarian measures in accordance with the above-mentioned
principles.
V. The proper organisation of a widely-conceived system of migration
and settlement, better credit facilities, reform of the Peasant Bank, and
assistance to
co-operative enterprises. VI. The radical revision of land-surveying legislation
with a view to simplifying, facilitating, and cheapening demarcation,
abolishing the open-field system on privately owned lands and peasant
allotments, making possible the exchange of lots, etc.”

Beforedealing with this most instructive programme point by point, let us dwell
on its significance as a whole. Undoubtedly, the very fact that spokesmen of the
landlord class present such a programme proves more conclusively than lengthy
arguments that Russia differs substantially in some respect from all the fully
formed capitalist nations of Western Europe. In what does this difference
consist? Is it in the semi-socialist village communal system that prevails in
our country with the corresponding absence of a bourgeois intelligentsia and of
bourgeois democracy, as the old Narodnik socialists used to think and as the
“Socialists Revolutionaries” still think to some extent? Or is it in
the multitude of feudal survivals that enmesh our countryside, making it
impossible for capitalism to develop widely and freely and creating Narodnik
moods precisely in bourgeois-democratic circles? This is a question no thinking
socialist will dismiss with evasive excuses, or on the grounds that it is too
abstract and theoretical, supposedly out of place in an epoch of revolution, or
by reference to the fact of peasant uprisings as a sufficient explanation of the
landlords’ complaisance. Now, in the epoch of revolution, evasiveness or lack
of principle in theoretical questions is tantamount to utter ideological
bankruptcy; for now of all times a socialist requires a well-thought-out and
consistent world out look, so that he may control the events and not the events
him. Reference to the peasant uprisings contributes nothing either, for the
programme now adopted by the landed proprietors, who are politically organised
in Zemstvo unions, embodies the wishes which have been expressed for many a
decade by the whole liberal press and by all liberal leaders. The Narodnik
programme has become the programme of the landlords—a fact that gives a
clear political answer to the question we have raised. In a revolutionary epoch
theoretical disputes over social issues are settled by the direct action of the
diverse classes.

Letus now examine the agrarian programme of the liberals more closely. Our
legal press is inclined to sing its
praises. Economicheskaya Gazeta, for instance, “records the fact
that the Zemstvo people have come forward with an agrarian programme that is
incomparably more extreme [really!] than could have been expected, judging from
the prevailing impression of the composition of the Zemstvo at the present
time” (extreme, that is, from the point of view of the
landlords?). “This is evidence of the fact,” continues the article,
“that the Zemstvo political group possesses both political tact and a deep
understanding of what is taking place about us....

Thetact and the understanding of the landlords consist in the fact that when
the peasants themselves began to intervene actively and definitely in agrarian
relations, these landlords began to speak of the necessity of state
interference. The same old story! State intervention in agrarian
relations has
always been a fact in Russia. When it was intervention in the interests of the
upper classes, it was called in police parlance “order”; when the
intervention comes from below, it is called “disorder”. Yes, but
what kind of intervention do the landlords want? Their programme shows that they
want intervention exclusively to regulate the relations between owners and
tenants.
ALL the
measures which they propose, from redemption of supplementary
plots to credit facilities and the exchange of lots, etc., apply exclusively to
those persons who use the land, i.e., the various categories of farmers. And
what of the rural labourers who have no farms of their own? As far back as the
nineties of the past century, in Russia’s fifty interior” gubernias alone
there were estimated to be no fewer than three and a half million
farm-hands and day-labourers for whom farm employment was the principal means
of earning a livelihood. Today, the number of agricultural wage-labourers is
undoubtedly still greater, and the overwhelming majority of them are entirely or
almost entirely farmless. Apart from those who possessed neither home nor farm,
it was estimated that more than three million of the approximately ten million
peasant farms in the stated gubernias possessed no horses; and that was
ten years ago. All these are farmers in name alone. Their most vital interests
lie in higher wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions. The
landlords are discreetly silent
on the subject of intervention in the relations between employers and
workers. And we may rest assured that no one will give this kind of
intervention serious thought until the rural workers themselves intervene.

WeSocial-Democrats must pay most serious attention to this kind of
intervention. Both the immediate practical interests of the movement and our
general principles demand it. The bourgeois-democratic nature of Russian
liberalism and of Russian Narodism has always manifested itself, among other
things, in the fact that the interests of small farming completely overshadow
the interests of rural hired labour. Of course, convinced Narodniks, and
sometimes “Socialists-Revolutionaries”, are prone to regard this as
quite natural in view of the “secondary” role (in their
imagination, but not in actual peasant life) of hired labour, in view
of the fact
that with the further development of “village communal traditions”,
“labour views”, and “equalised tenure”, this role
might even be reduced to nought. But this tendency, however earnest,
sincere, and socialistic the justifying speeches may be, is in fact a sign of
nothing but petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness. This sort of day dreaming, a
quality possessed by both the Russian peasant and the Russian intellectual, is
petty-bourgeois day-dreaming. The flowers of this Narodnik day-dreaming are the
same fictitious flowers that decorate one of the chains of labouring mankind,
and Social-Democratic criticism must ruthlessly pluck out such flowers,
“not that man should continue to wear his chain bereft of all joy and
pleasure, but that he should throw off the chain and reach for the
living flower.”[3]

Weare in full sympathy with the peasant movement. We would consider it a
tremendous gain both for the general social development of Russia and for the
Russian proletariat if the peasantry, with our help, succeeded in wresting from
the landlords all their lands by revolutionary means. But even assuming
this most favourable outcome—even then, the mass of agricultural
hired labourers would only temporarily diminish in number but could in no event
disappear altogether. Even then, the independent interests of the rural
hired labourers would remain independent interests.

Thetransfer of the land to the peasants would not at all do away with the
predominance of the capitalist mode
of production in Russia; it would, on the contrary, provide a broader base for
its development; it would bring this development from the type approximating the
Italian closer to the American. The property distinctions among the peasants,
which are already tremendous, but relatively not very noticeable chiefly on
account of the general oppression under the absolutist serf-owning system,
would not in any way cease to exist. The expansion of the home market, the
development of exchange and commodity production on a new scale, the rapid
growth of industry and of cities— all these inevitable effects of a
substantial improvement in the condition of the peasants would unavoidably
increase property distinctions. The more illusions on that score are widespread
among us, the more energetically must the Social-Democrats combat them, if they
really want to represent the interests of the working-class movement as a
whole, and not merely of one of its
stages.[1]

Untilthere has been a complete socialist revolution, not even the most radical
and most revolutionary measures for agrarian reform will eliminate the class of
agricultural wage-workers. The dream of making all people petty-bourgeois is a
reactionary platitude. For this reason we should start working now to develop
the class-consciousness of the rural wage-workers and to rally them into an
independent class organisation. The strike wave in the towns can and should
spread to the villages, not only in the form of peasant uprisings, but in the
form of real labour strikes, especially at mowing and harvesting time. The
demands contained in the working-class section of our programme, which are so
often presented by the urban workers to their employers, must, with the
corresponding changes necessitated by the different living conditions, be put
forward by the rural workers, too. We must take advantage of the fact that so
far there are no special laws in Russia degrading the position of the rural
workers below that of the urban workers (except for the law forbidding them to
leave their work without permission). We must see to it that the rising tide of
the proletarian movement creates a specifically proletarian mood and
proletarian methods of struggle among the farm-hands and day-labourers.

Thepetty-bourgeois stratum of the rural population, the peasantry in the strict
and narrow sense of the word, cannot help being revolutionary at certain periods
in history. Its present revolutionary attitude is an inevitable product of the
conditions of the “old order’, and we must vigorously support and develop
it. But it will follow just as inevitably from the conditions of the new order,
of the new, free, capitalist Russia, that part of the rural petty bourgeoisie
will side with “order”; and the more land the peasants take away
from the landlords now, the sooner this will come about. In the countryside,
too, only the rural proletariat can be a truly revolutionary class, a class
that, under all circumstances, is revolutionary to the end. The conversion of
the wretched, downtrodden muzhik into a free, energetic European farmer will be a
tremendous democratic gain; but we socialists shall not forget for a moment that
this gain will be of no real use to the cause of mankind’s complete
emancipation from all oppression unless and insofar as the farmer is
confronted by a
class-conscious, free, and organised rural proletariat.

Theliberal landlords keep quiet about the rural worker. As far as the future
farmer is concerned, their sole concern is to get him converted as quickly as
possible, with the mini mum loss to their pockets (it would, perhaps, be more
correct to say with the maximum gain to their pockets), into their ally, into a
man of property, a pillar of order. What miserable sops they hope to get off
with! Their only revolutionary measure, the confiscation of the royal demesnes,
is restricted to a part of these lands; they are afraid to call
confiscation confiscation, and say nothing about the church lands. While
promising supplementary plots to the land-poor, they firmly insist on
redemption, with not a word about who should make the redemption payment. They
obviously take it for granted that the peasant will pay, as in the case of the
famed redemption of 1861. The landlords will give up their worst lands at
exorbitant prices, which is what their supplementary endowments promise. All the
measures they propose in regard to credits, co-operation, exchange of lots,
etc., are restricted entirely to narrow proprietary
interests. With regard to leases—one of the most acute problems of peasant
farming—t.hey offer nothing but the vaguest of
catchwords—“regulation”. This may mean any thing at all, even an
increase in rents, on the pretext of standardisation; we indicated above what
the representatives of the ruling classes have always understood by
“order”.

However,the most important and politically most dangerous feature of the
liberal programme is, in our view, the clause concerning the “public and
state mediation commissions”. The method of realising the agrarian reform
is a matter of great importance; for on the method of realisation, concretely
and actually, will depend the earnest character of the reform. In regard to this
question too (as in regard to many others), we have the Narodniks to thank when
we pay the main attention to the economic advantage, ignoring or underestimating
the political aspect of the matter. This point of view, natural in a petty
bourgeois, understandable in a farmer, is absolutely inadmissible in a
Social-Democrat. To the Social-Democrat shifts within the classes and
categories of farmers and proprietors are of no consequence unless accompanied
by a political gain that facilitates the class struggle of the proletariat. From
the point of view of petty-bourgeois day-dreaming, all schemes for
“equalised tenure”, etc., are important. From the point of view of
the Social-Democrat, all such projects are idle and harmful day-dreams that
divert the public mind from the realities of real democratic gains. The
Social-Democrats will never forget that the ruling classes always and everywhere
try to divide and corrupt the working people with economic sops. In the sphere
of agrarian reform they find this policy particularly easy and pursue it with
particular skill.

Allthe more definitely and emphatically must we insist on the basic
demand of our agrarian programme, namely, the establishment of revolutionary
peasant committees that will themselves enforce really radical (not in the
landlords’ sense “radical”) agrarian reforms. Short of this, every
agrarian reform will inevitably and inescapably be a new fraud, a new trap, like
the famed “Reform” of 1861. This is precisely what the “public
[?] and state mediation commissions” are—the laying of a trap! By
“public” we understand the landlords; by “state”—the
bureaucrats. “Public and state
commissions” means landlords’ and bureaucrats’
commissions pure and simple.

Thatis the point on which we must immediately focus our agitation in the
countryside. Peasants, do you hear? They want once again to load you with
benefits in true bureaucratic manner, to “regulate” your life by
landlord intervention, to “redeem” land for you on the pattern of
that old-time land redemption of dismal memory! The landlords are so kind, so
very kind: seeing that their lands are in danger of being taken away for
nothing, they magnanimously consent to sell them—at a suitable
price, of course.... Do you agree to such intervention on the part of landlords
and bureaucrats? Or do you want to intervene yourselves and build up a
life of freedom for yourselves? Then unite with the urban proletariat, fight for
the republic, arise for the insurrection which will bring you a revolutionary
government and revolutionary peasant committees!

Notes

[2]Moskovskiye Vedomosti (Moscow Recorder)—a
newspaper, founded in
1756. Since the sixties of the nineteenth century it voiced the views of the
most reactionary monarchist sections of the landlords and the clerical
order. From 1905, it was one of the chief organs of the Black Hundreds. Its
publication continued until the October
Revolution, 1917.